Social Historian

By MAUREEN DOWD

Published: October 7, 2007

It's hard not to like a book that expounds on Marilyn Monroe on one page and the Monroe Doctrine on the next. When Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. ruminates on the realm of hemispheric affairs, the transition from one Monroe to the other is seamless, as is the slide from Bosnia to Bianca Jagger and from Alexander Hamilton to Angie Dickinson. His diaries are a Tiffany's window of name-dropping. This is not history so much as historical trail mix.

The old-school, bow-tied liberal and Kennedy courtier had a weakness for cafe society and Century Club martinis served by Arthur the Barbadian drinks waiter. He was just as happy talking about NATO enlargement or celebrity enlargement, fastidiously jotting down when Elizabeth Taylor, Norman Mailer and Robert Bork -- and himself, ''alas'' -- looked a bit fat. And heaven help poor John Kenneth Galbraith's wife, Kitty, the night she showed up amid the ''notables affably circulating,'' as our diarist likes to say, ''dowdily dressed.''

The Pulitzer Prize-winning historian worried that he was frittering away time on the high life that could be spent on high-minded histories, but the old boy just couldn't help it. Tom Stoppard started as a party reporter and Arthur Schlesinger ended as one. ''Around 8:30 we went off to Romanoff's for Gore Vidal's party. ... I had a pleasant talk with Jack Lemmon -- very small, quick; mobile features. I told him I had much preferred 'Some Like It Hot' to 'The Apartment.' ... I liked Shelley Winters. ... Lollobrigida was a disappointment.''

In the summer of '61, he exuberantly describes a ''fantastic ball'' at the Mellons' one Friday with ''an infinitude of Champagne,'' like ''the night before Agincourt,'' where he chatted with Babe Paley; followed by a raucous Saturday wedding anniversary dinner for Bobby and Ethel at their Hickory Hill estate with ''wild dancing''; Lester Lanin playing; Judy Garland, Kay Thompson and Ethel singing; Teddy plunging into the pool in his dinner jacket; and Ben Bradlee declaring it ''a horror movie.'' In the next entry, or ''thence,'' as he would say, the house intellectual is diligently writing a test-ban white paper for President Kennedy.

Along with a cascade of books, lectures, essays, op-eds as well as speeches for several decades of Democratic pols, Schlesinger kept journals for what was intended to be a two-part memoir. The first half of his overstuffed life was recounted in an underwhelming book called ''A Life in the 20th Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917-1950,'' published in 2000. He only got to age 33. Slowed by Parkinson's disease, heading for his 90th birthday, the historian ran out of time to do the sequel, covering the juiciest era, when he was closest to power.

When his wily agent, Andrew Wylie, discovered 6,000 pages of journals covering five decades in Schlesinger's office in 2006, stored on a shelf above a small refrigerator, it seemed a shame not to share the treasure trove of raw dish with the world. After all, Schlesinger had been worrying in later years that he was ''perennially broke'' and had no savings account. If history is a debt of honor we owe to the past, as the author likes to say, couldn't it pay past debts?

Asked by the press in 1973 about the Nixon tapes, the historian huffs that it was ''inconceivable'' that his hero would have done that -- until Kennedy's brother-in-law Steve Smith calls to break the news that there were some tapes. ''As a person,'' he tells his diary primly, ''I think it is a poor idea to record other people's conversation without their knowing it.'' But he overcomes these qualms with his own journals. His two older sons, who winnowed the transcripts down, said their father cut ''astonishingly little'' for reasons of discretion in this ''jewel box'' of memories. Logging in at 858 pages before the index, it's more like a shipping container. They said their father, with his ''proper New England upbringing,'' had always ''frowned upon'' writing about intimacy, but now they could showcase his ''almost voluptuous eyes and soul.''

In and out of politics, Schlesinger bowed to glamour, wit and style. He had considered becoming a theater critic when he was young, and even when he was working in the Kennedy White House, he moonlighted doing film reviews for Show magazine. (The president told him dryly he didn't mind as long as Peter Lawford was treated with respect.)

Pulled into ''the orbit of mortality,'' his ''glittering ladies'' now ''falling away,'' his old Harvard and Century Club pals dying, the man criticized for shaping his histories around his loyalties was prepared to be Schlesinger unleashed.

Schlesinger unleashed, as it turns out, can still be quite buttery.

Nov. 1, 1952: ''What a beautiful -- and delightful -- girl Lauren Bacall is! -- even more attractive in the flesh than on the screen.''

Sept. 21, 1979: ''Why besides being so astonishingly beautiful and intelligent is Jackie so fascinating? Because of the impression she gives of total, exclusive and absorbed concentration on oneself. ... ''